

While the specifics regarding the creation of the Star Wars Celica GT are a bit muddied, most sources agree on the following details: The design was entrusted to John Sladek, chief stylist at Delphi Auto Design in Costa Mesa (alternately reported as Delthic Auto Design), who also is credited with creating the poster art for the sweepstakes. Promotional Company Marden-Kane, the very entity that handled the sweepstakes in 1977, joined the search in 2015, followed by a semi-official call to arms by Toyota of Great Britain in the same year. Since then, the same set of about a half a dozen photographs and illustrations of the Star Wars Celica have been repurposed countless times but the trail remains cold.
Car ad wars archive#
(Additional prizes in the contest included a very-’70s-tastic Club Med vacation, eight-millimeter Star Wars films, soundtrack LPs, T-shirts, and books.) Numerous media outlets have reported on the Star Wars Celica’s brief appearance and near-immediate disappearance from the public eye for more than a decade now, most accounts tracing back to an April 2001 post on Relics of the Outer Rim, a sub-directory of the comprehensive Star Wars Collectors Archive site.


Car ad wars movie#
But while the development and release of most the toys and ephemera inspired by the movie have been chronicled in detail, the Star Wars–edition 1977 Toyota Celica GT remains an enigma parked inside a black hole.īuilt in 1977 as the grand prize in the Star Wars Space Fantasy sweepstakes, the car has for the better part of the last 40 years remained an apparition. Hollywood was taken slightly off guard by its near-instant success, but the dealmakers wasted little time in revving up the promotional machine to satisfy the demands of a new generation that was raised in a crossfire of multimedia marketing. Released with little fanfare over Memorial Day weekend in 1977, Star Wars (renamed Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope for the 1981 re-release) defied expectations at the box office and launched what is largely considered to be the most successful movie franchise of all time.
Car ad wars tv#
tracks TV ads in real-time and allows customers to monitor social actions, search activity and online video views associated with TV spots across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Bing and Yahoo!.Like all good 1970s California-centric pop-culture phenomena, the near-mythical and oft-repeated tale of the 1977 Toyota Celica GT Star Wars sweepstakes has all the hallmarks of good sun-kissed, Me Decade mystery: inspiration, fantasy, airbrushing, a Farrah Fawcett hairdo, and Hare Krishnas-and that’s before things get really weird. The holidays already are on the horizon with Dodge’s No.5 commercial about Black Friday deals, featuring music from the popular Trans-Siberian Orchestra. So far the ad has run fewer than 1,000 times but captured a respectable 14.5% of the industry’s digital share of voice for the last week.įord, which took first place last week, drops to second with its spot featuring Emilie Mover’s song “Happy Day.” Mazda maintains a hold on third and fourth place, with spots narrated by Aaron Paul for the ’16 CX-5 and ’17 Mazda3, respectively. The commercial plays off the upcoming Star Wars film “Rogue One” to showcase the car’s intelligent all-wheel-drive, pedestrian-detection and automatic-stopping features. A Star Wars-themed ad for the ’17 Nissan Rogue grabs the top spot on the Most Engaging Auto Ads chart, powered for WardsAuto by.
